Kansas center Hunter Dickinson (1) loses the ball to Houston guard Mylik Wilson (8) in overtime just before a three from Wilson to force double overtime on Saturday, Jan. 25, 2025 at Allen Fieldhouse. Photo by Nick Krug

Houston coach Kelvin Sampson, in praising his team’s maturity after it beat Kansas at Allen Fieldhouse on Saturday night, uttered one of his typical aphorisms: “There’s a 94-foot slab of rectangular wood we play on. What goes on outside that is not in our control.”

While Sampson may have been right in a broader, mental sense, Houston’s victory had a lot to do with something that quite literally took place a few inches off the basketball court. In both regulation and overtime, KU failed to inbound the ball onto the slab of wood when it mattered most.

The Jayhawks squandered six-point leads in the final moments of both periods, and that had quite a lot to do with the fact that they committed a five-second violation up two points with 16.6 seconds left in regulation and then threw the ball away in a similar situation with 7.5 left in overtime.

Guard Zeke Mayo was the unfortunate Jayhawk bearing the responsibility of getting the ball in against a Houston defense that gave KU absolutely no room to function. But KU coach Bill Self took the blame upon himself for his team’s lack of execution in either scenario.

“We had a way to get it in that we practice every day,” Self said. “Maybe (it was) not having KJ (Adams), who’s our best athlete to get open, but we didn’t make a great effort to get open.”

He also said that in regulation, he should have called a timeout. Mayo had attempted to do so himself, but it was too late; he had already spent his five seconds.

First he had run the baseline to his right looking for David Coit, off a screen from Rylan Griffen, but Coit was blanketed by Mylik Wilson. Mayo ran back the other way to find Dajuan Harris Jr. covered closely by LJ Cryer, and then didn’t have a good look at his tertiary option, Griffen.

After the five-second violation, Shakeel Moore fouled J’Wan Roberts, who made a pair of game-tying free throws.

With another look, and his center Hunter Dickinson providing a big target in the backcourt, Mayo was more decisive on his overtime attempt. He passed up the Coit-Wilson matchup again, but tried to lob the ball to Dickinson, who had 10 inches on 6-foot-4 Houston guard Milos Uzan. But Uzan leapt up and got a piece of the pass, deflecting it right to Wilson.

At that moment in the second situation, unlike after the first with Moore, a foul on the floor might have done the Jayhawks some good, as they were up three points.

“I didn’t tell them to foul immediately if something went bad,” Self said. “I thought that was sending the wrong message. Obviously something did go bad, and then they make the shot. We had numerous opportunities.”

Dickinson was directly in front of Wilson but peeled off him to defend a possible return pass to Uzan in the corner, and Coit couldn’t get back to Wilson clearly enough to seriously contest his attempt from the left wing. He drained it, tying the game, and KU eventually lost after the second overtime.

With all the chaos occurring in off-ball coverage, Sampson attributed Houston’s success against the inbounds to someone right in front of Mayo: the highly athletic 6-foot-8 forward JoJo Tugler.

“JoJo takes everything vertical away,” Sampson said, “so the denies now come left and right.”

Sampson said Tugler has the ability to rattle players attempting to get the ball in to their teammates.

“JoJo’s like a big old bull that’s snorting at you and stomping his hooves and whipping his tail around,” Sampson said. “He’s a factor. Then from there, you can tell there’s some kids that it’s like a quarterback when the defensive ends get on top of him — he stops looking at his receivers and starts looking at the defensive players. And that makes your press a little bit better.”

The two late-game turnovers didn’t cost KU a key victory on their own, of course.

The Jayhawks went 17-for-30 from the stripe. Harris missed a pair of free throws right before Houston hit back-to-back 3s in overtime, and before Griffen and AJ Storr each came up empty on their own trips to the line in the second overtime.

That’s to say nothing of numerous empty possessions in the halfcourt offense, the inability to stop J’Wan Roberts in the post or a moment late in regulation at which Mayo didn’t get a foul call after he got a defender in the air on a 3-point attempt (which Self brought up after the loss).

But by the time Dickinson reached the Allen Fieldhouse media room for postgame interviews, he said he had been thinking about the second inbound play for the prior 15 minutes.

“I’m not sure what went wrong,” he said. “I got to look at the film again. I don’t know. We got to find out a way to close out games better.”